The guy didn’t even vote against “skinny repeal” of ObamaCare. He was with the White House on the biggest gut-check of Trump’s presidency to date. And yet, new numbers out of Arizona from PPP:

In a hypothetical race with a generic Democrat, a Republican incumbent in a red state is below 50 percent within his own party? No way. And that 18 percent overall job approval — nuh uh. Nothing in America polls at 18 percent except cancer, tax hikes, and Republican health-care bills.

Morning Consult polled Arizona from early April to mid-June and found Flake at 36/42 approval overall and 51/35 among Republicans. That seems more plausible. The guy’s clearly in trouble, ripe for either a primary challenge from the populist right or a tough midterm general election from a centrist Democrat in a purple state, but an incumbent’s not going to pull 22 percent job approval within his own party (as PPP has it) unless he’s voted to legalize heroin or something. But then, the Morning Consult numbers were gathered before Flake published his new anti-Trump book and began criticizing the president consistently and aggressively over the past 10 days or so. Trump was at 65 percent approval among Arizona Republicans in the PPP poll. Is it possible that Flake warring with the leader of the GOP has tanked his support?

It could also be that Flake’s libertarian brand of conservatism is increasingly a relic within the party, leaving even some Republican voters walking away from him. Reihan Salam calls Flake a Reaganite in a post-Reagan country:

To Flake, the only way forward for the GOP is to embrace the small-government philosophy he attributes to Goldwater and Ronald Reagan and to place the pursuit of more open trade and immigration policies at the heart of the party’s policy agenda. This is despite the fact that when Reagan championed higher immigration levels, the labor market position of less-skilled workers was just beginning its long, downward slide, a decline that has been hard on working-class natives and immigrants alike. In the Reagan era, we also didn’t already have a large population of immigrants and children of immigrants living in or near poverty, millions of whom depend on programs like Medicaid that Flake is so eager to slash.

As for trade policy, I have no quarrel with the idea that tariffs are bad. What is also true, however, is that the offshoring of high-tech profits to Ireland and other tax havens is at least as big a deal as the offshoring of low-wage jobs to China. Global imbalances also helped create the conditions for the last financial crisis and pose an ongoing threat to global prosperity. If we want to preserve the benefits of globalization, we should probably rewrite the tax code in ways that will displease multinationals, and we should also probably nudge surplus countries such as China and Germany into being more constructive economic partners.

Flake’s response to the changing economy and resulting changes in the party’s ideological lean is to say, “Given the alternatives, I’ll take the globalist moniker, thank you.” Good for him. The man has the courage of his convictions. What he may not have much longer is a job.

One more result from the PPP poll. Which doesn’t belong and why?

Democrats are far less likely to vote for Flake after he cast his vote for “skinny repeal,” which makes perfect sense. So are independents, which stands to reason — the GOP’s health-care efforts have been broadly unpopular and Flake was all aboard. Then you move to the Republican column and … w-w-w-what? Flake voted with Trump to repeal ObamaCare and a plurality of GOPers now say they’re less likely to vote for him? I assume that’s a combination of the bill being somewhat unpopular even on the right and simple ignorance of how Flake actually voted. When asked if they approve of McCain’s vote on skinny repeal, which of course was “no,” sinking the bill, Arizona Republicans split 35/60. Flake voted yes, meanwhile, yet Republicans are less likely to vote for him now than before. Presumably a bunch of GOPers in the state are under the mistaken impression that Flake also voted no, possibly because he usually votes with McCain and possibly because their general disdain for him as a “RINO” is coloring their guess at how he voted. Whatever the truth, he’s caught in a bind now. If he advertises his yes vote to win back Republicans, he alienates independents. If he downplays it, R’s may continue to mistakenly believe he helped sink repeal.

Oh, and just to add to the weirdness: When you ask Trump voters (as opposed to Republicans generally) whether Flake’s health-care vote makes them more or less likely to support him, they answer rationally. A plurality of 43 percent say “more likely” versus 27 percent who say “less likely.” How is it that Trump voters seem to know how Flake voted but Republicans don’t? Or is it that both groups know how he voted and even Republicans ended up hating “skinny repeal”?

An instant classic from the masters of the troll-poll genre, Public Policy Polling. I think the numbers here are a case of the respondents being in on the joke, offering a trollishly insincere answer to a trollish question, but I don’t know. Here’s what a local GOP chairwoman in Tennessee said recently when asked if there’s anything Trump could do to alienate her:

There’s very little that would change her mind about Trump.

“I don’t know what he would have to do … I guess maybe kill someone. Just in cold blood,” Pearson said.

I know I speak for all of us when I say: Who are the four percent of Hillary Clinton voters who’d give Trump a pass for coming out guns blazing on Fifth Avenue? (Never mind the 14 percent of Gary Johnson voters. They’re libertarians. They’re weird by definition.)

The most fun questions in this poll, though, have to do with Russiagate. Here’s the split when voters last fall were asked whether Trump should resign if it can be proved that members of his campaign colluded with Russia to help him win the election:

I think that question’s trickier than it first appears. Much depends on what Trump himself knew, how high-ranking the colluders in his campaign were, and what precisely they did with Russia to give him a leg up. You don’t want the president forced out due to actions taken by an underling that he didn’t know about and that may not have had any appreciable effect on the outcome. But if he and Kushner were huddling with Russian intelligence on the best ways to use the DNC and Podesta material? Yeah, obviously. You could argue that the honorable thing to do would be to resign if you discovered members of your campaign had conspired with the Kremlin, whether you benefited directly or not. But c’mon, look who we’re talking about here. Resigning out of honor would be a total cuck move, the sort of thing — ugh — Mitt Romney might do.

Here’s my favorite question from the poll: Do you believe Donald Trump Jr had a meeting with a Russian lawyer to discuss opposition research on Hillary Clinton? Don Jr admits to this completely (now), of course, and there’s contemporaneous emails to back up the fact that it happened. And yet — not even a simple majority of Trump voters are willing to say that it happened:

Presumably that 32 percent of Trump voters who say no are simply not up to date on the news and answering blindly in the best interests of their guy. If the media says Don Jr had a meeting with a Russian lawyer, which would make the president and his inner circle look bad, it must be false, no? Relatedly, PPP polled people on whether they trust Trump more or various news outlets — CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, the NYT, and WaPo — more. The most striking thing about the results is how consistent they are, varying only slightly from outlet to outlet between 11 percent and 14 percent in terms of Trump voters who trust them more than they do the president. That’s as solid an indicator as you could hope for in gauging the share of hardcore anti-Trumpers within the GOP. No surprise that when asked whether Russiagate is “fake news” or not, exactly 14 percent of Trump voters say no versus 72 percent who say yes.

One more result for you, just because. Trump vs. Mark Zuckerberg in 2020: Pure toss-up.

Eh. By 2020, the United States will be a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon. The president will just be a glorified secretary to Emperor Jeff Bezos.

Here’s Trump in better times exulting in the total loyalty of his most devoted fans. A Twitter pal asked a good question this morning: What are we to make of the fact that Trump believes, with some reason, that he could literally kill someone and pay no price politically for it among his base, and also believes that meeting with the “Russian government” to dig up dirt on his opponent is nothing to apologize for, and yet he remains fiercely secretive about his tax returns? What the hell could be in those returns that would make a guy who’s otherwise convinced he can get away with anything so paranoid about them being disclosed?

A rare moment of semi-consensus between Trumpers and fans of Green Party oddity Jill Stein. Don’t ask me why they specified “Republican politicians” in the question instead of using “politicians” generally. Presumably it’s because this comes from (who else?) the left-leaning troll-poll maestros at PPP, who knew that if they tilted the question in a partisan way they’d be more likely to get Trump voters and Republicans answering yes to violence.

PPP also dug into the numbers on Comey and Trump. Hey, remember when Comey’s name was a curse word for months among Democrats on the not-implausible theory that his last-minute letter about reopening the email investigation had cost her the presidency? All is forgiven, my friends, now that he’s Trump enemy number one:

Overall, when asked whether they trust Comey more or Trump more, the public splits 51/39. Democrats (83/9) and Republicans (13/78) are basically mirror images of each other; Comey prevails because independents trust him more, 49/35.

One more oddball result, again having to do with Russia:

A plurality of Republican voters think Russia was trying to help Hillary, whom Putin famously loathes and whose surrogates at the DNC and in John Podesta’s office were targeted with hacks, instead of Trump? If you were Putin, whom would you prefer — the hawkish Democrat who questioned the legitimacy of Russia’s elections in 2011 or the NATO skeptic who was prone to answering questions about Putin murdering journalists by noting that the U.S. does lots of bad stuff too? I can understand being agnostic on this question on grounds that Putin prizes chaos and distrust in democratic institutions above any particular electoral outcome, but if you’re going to choose one or the other, why not choose the candidate whom the entire U.S. natsec community claims Putin was trying to help? Trump shouldn’t take comfort in his party’s division on this question either. On the much more important political question of whether he should resign if any members of his campaign team — not him personally, just his associates — are found to have colluded with Russia during the campaign, 54 percent say he should. Among indies it’s 51 percent, with even 18 percent of Republicans agreeing. If Bob Mueller nails Paul Manafort for collusion, Trump’s going to have a major political problem even if he’s not charged with anything himself.

A hopeful note in closing: Partisan opinion on Russia and Putin, which had been diverging after the election, is back in line despite Trump’s continued hopes for some sort of diplomatic reset with Moscow. Among Democrats, Putin’s favorability is 4/81. Among Republicans, it’s not much better at 11/70.

You may say that this data isn’t worth taking seriously because it was compiled by left-wing PPP. Me, I say it’s a perfect excuse for a weeknight bender.

Alternate headline: 76 percent of Hillary Clinton voters are suddenly against private servers, huh? Didn’t we just get done with two years of “WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL?”

Republicans overall oppose the idea of a private POTUS server — narrowly, at 39/44. If you want to read these results charitably, you could argue that there’s nothing inherently wrong with having a private email server, even if you’re a high-ranking official like the president or secretary of state. Keep your homebrew set-up quarantined from anything work-related and there should be no national-security implications. If you want to read the results less charitably, i.e. more realistically, you might note that poll questions like this are asked against a backdrop of widely known public facts. The whole point of the Hillary email scandal was that sensitive information needs to stay on highly secure government servers, as having a homebrew server creates a natural risk that that information will cross over from the public system to the private one in the course of daily correspondence. What you’re seeing in the numbers, I think, is a simple reflection of partisan trust or distrust in a particular official, namely, Trump. Which is not how it’s supposed to go on the right: One of the reasons you believe in smaller government if you believe in smaller government is because you know that large bureaucracies tend to behave incompetently. A private email server for any official with access to state secrets is a bad idea.

If you’re inclined to assume that Team Trump would be a better steward of a private server than Team Hillary was (hard to see how they could be worse), note that he already has potential infosec problems of his own. Reportedly he’s still using his old Android phone alongside the White House’s secure phone system. What could go wrong with that? A lot, potentially:

When Obama described [his secure White House cell phone] to Jimmy Fallon, he noted a few drawbacks. The phone could not take pictures, presumably so the camera couldn’t be accessed remotely (and so that Obama wouldn’t be able to take pictures that might later be stolen).

The phone couldn’t send text messages (SMS messages are notoriously easy to intercept), only email, and couldn’t make regular phone calls, only VoIP (voice over internet protocol, like Skype). Presumably, this was so all of his communications could be routed through secure channels.

He also couldn’t load music onto it — because if you can load files onto the phone, you can load malware onto the phone. A user can’t download apps from the Google Play storefront onto a DMCC-S phone…

Trump, on the other hand, is using a phone with none of these protections.

It’s an open question whether his Twitter account is fully secure too as that was hacked once before, in 2013. Cybersleuths poking around Trump’s @POTUS account have already figured out that it’s secured by a Gmail account; if that Gmail account were hacked, it’d presumably be easy to request a new password to the Twitter account, log in, and wreak havoc. Imagine the market chaos from a bogus tweet about, say, antitrust action in the works against a major company.

Speaking of partisan expedience driving poll results, chew on this one from the PPP data — a simple question asking who the better president is likely to be, Trump or a guy whom hard leftists in recent memory compared to Hitler and called a war criminal.

By a cozy margin of 62/14, Democrats would prefer a George W. Bush restoration to four years of Trump. This bender might just bleed into tomorrow and go all weekend.

When PPP did a poll on the holidays immediately following the 2012 election, 52% of Americans said they believed in Santa Claus, to 45% who said they did not. We’ve re-upped that question in the wake of this year’s election, and belief in Santa Claus has gone all the way down to 31% with non-belief shooting up to 59%. It’s not even just Democrats dispirited about the results of the election who have lost their belief in Santa. Republicans (52% in 2012, 34% now), Democrats (55% in 2012, 32% now), and independents (47% in 2012, 27% now) have all had their belief in Santa dashed in pretty similar numbers.

A majority of Republicans may not believe in Santa but if he does exist they know one thing about him- he’s white. GOP voters nationally by a 54-6 margin say that Santa is white, with 41% having no opinion one way or another. 57% of Democrats have no opinion on this question and those who do are relatively divided, with 26% saying Santa’s white to 18% who say he’s not.

With faith in many American institutions near 25-year lows, it’s understandable that our faith in North Pole institutions would also suffer. Declining cultural confidence is a western contagion without borders: It starts with Brexit, it spreads to America with Trump, and pretty soon you’re no longer putting out a plate of cookies by the chimney on Christmas Eve.

This result is more surprising, although maybe it shouldn’t be:

Four years ago, PPP got a 44/28 split on the question of whether Santa is a Democrat or Republican. Go figure that in our politically topsy-turvy time, with “globalist” Democrats pounding the table for free trade while Santa Trump promises a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill and no wavering on entitlements, it’s not clear which party currently better embodies the spirit of handing out goodies.

Here’s a little something to help rejuvenate our Christmas spirit. Exit question: I can sort of buy, per this poll, that five percent of the public views Christmas unfavorably, but five percent also views “It’s a Wonderful Life” unfavorably? What? If we can’t achieve unanimity on that, there’ll never be peace on Earth.

]]>3937191Combined age of top three Democrats in new 2020 poll: 216 years oldhttp://hotair.com/archives/2016/12/13/combined-age-of-top-three-democrats-in-new-2020-poll-216-years-old/
Wed, 14 Dec 2016 01:21:52 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3935777Seniority.

Their current combined age is 216, I should specify. Tack another 11 years on there if you’re looking for their combined age as of Election Day 2020. (Biden will turn 78 a few weeks after the next election.)

Are we still pretending, by the way, that Kanye West isn’t going to be the nominee in 2020? I guess PPP is. Table one…

…annnnnd the highly contradictory table two:

Science will eventually figure out a way to extend human life spans to the point where America’s comfortable electing a president who’ll turn 80 while in office, but it ain’t happening by 2020. Biden will be 78 by then and Bernie Sanders will be 79. They’re nonstarters, included among the top three here due to pure name recognition and, in all likelihood, widespread public ignorance (for now) of just how old they really are. Warren, who’s 67, is a different story. She’d be among the oldest nominees ever in 2020, but she’s three years younger than Trump and would be only a year older in 2020 than he was when he won the nomination this year. Women tend to live longer than men too, so Democrats should be okay with rolling the dice on her. She’s a logical choice for a party that’s suddenly discovered it can’t trust demographics and identity politics to deliver victory in every circumstance. If they’re going to try to win back white working class voters, the class warrior Warren is an obvious possibility. (Whether a woman professor from Harvard would hold the same retail appeal to blue-collar voters as the politically incorrect alpha-male Trump is a separate question.)

If it’s not her, then who? Cory Booker would try to fill the Obama vacuum but without the same charisma and trailblazer appeal. Kirsten Gillibrand seems like a reasonably competent politician but maybe a woman senator from New York with lots of Wall Street donations isn’t the person to undo the damage from Hillary Clinton in the midwest. Kamala Harris, although she hasn’t take her Senate seat yet, might quickly find herself as the fallback option to Warren as someone who’s liberal, young, a woman, a minority, and a senator from the country’s biggest state. She’s not an obvious choice to win back the Rust Belt either, but there are really no heartland Democrats with a national profile to fill that niche. To find a winning coalition in 2020, Democrats might need to put Wisconsin — and Pennsylvania? — on the back burner and go all in on flipping Florida, Arizona, and Michigan. It’s a near-lock that a Latino candidate will be on the ticket, but maybe not at the top.

In case you missed it in Headlines earlier, here’s a fun short piece about Warren acting like a total idiot. In lieu of an exit question, enjoy this new portrait of the 45th and 46th presidents together. Like the man himself says: 2024.

Republicans barely clawed back the state of North Carolina in the 2012 election, four years after losing it for the first time since Gerald Ford lost to Jimmy Carter. According to a new poll from the New York Times and Siena College, Democrats may be on their way to clawing it back. The poll shows Hillary Clinton leading by seven points in a three-way race, but the results raise a few questions, too:

No state that voted for Mitt Romney in 2012 has posed a bigger challenge for Donald J. Trump than North Carolina. He has trailed in every survey there since the first presidential debate, and he does not have a credible path to the presidency without its 15 electoral votes.

A New York Times Upshot/Siena College survey released on Tuesday confirms that Mr. Trump’s standing has deteriorated considerably. Hillary Clinton has a seven-point lead over Mr. Trump in North Carolina, 46 percent to 39 percent, among likely voters in a three-way race including the Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson.

It’s a big improvement for Mrs. Clinton since September, when the last New York Times Upshot/Siena College poll showed a tied race in the state — as other polls at the time also did. It mirrors a national trend of steady gains for Mrs. Clinton throughout October.

Perhaps, but the survey has its issues, too. For one thing, no other poll in October has shown Hillary leading outside the margin of error in North Carolina. (In fact, a new poll from Democratic pollster PPP emerging as I write this post puts Hillary up only two points.) The largest lead Hillary got this month was a four-point edge in a ±3.6 poll from Marist for NBC/WSJ two weeks ago — and that gave Gary Johnson 9% of the respondents. Hillary’s RCP average lead for NC is 2.1 points, which makes a +7 result look outlier-ish, especially given the close nature of the state’s electoral results over the last several election cycles. Not even Barack Obama managed to get a majority of the vote here, winning with just 49.7% in 2008 to John McCain’s 49.4%.

The Marist poll had something else in common with the NYT/Siena survey — a largish Democratic sample. That poll was D+9, 40/31, among likely voters. The Siena poll has D+10, 36/26, and a larger representation of independents (who break to Trump by six points — but Mitt Romney won them by 15 points in 2012). Those, however, are not necessarily out of range. The 2008 turnout model was actually D+11, 42/31, with McCain winning more Democrats than Obama won Republicans. The 2012 turnout model was D+6 at 39/33, and that plus the same five-point loyalty edge was enough for Romney to win a two-point victory. Democratic party affiliation isn’t necessarily an indicator of presidential outcomes, especially in Southern states.

The bigger problem here is the outlier-ish nature of the results, but not necessarily the conclusion. RCP’s aggregation shows that Trump hasn’t led in a poll in North Carolina for over a month; in September, he seemed to have a polling lead, in fact. What looks clear from the trend is that while Hillary may not be dominating, she’s developed an edge in a state that Republicans cannot afford to lose. Those 15 electoral votes will put a big hole in the GOP’s standing, making a long-shot pickup elsewhere more or less a wash.

“My sense is we got a late start,” said Dan Gurley, former deputy political director and field director for the RNC. “We are playing catch up, but we are catching up.”

The Trump/RNC operation’s 11 field offices in North Carolina compare to 24 that Mitt Romney had in 2012, according to FiveThirtyEight. …

“But my observation is that Donald Trump doesn’t seem very interested in the ground game,” Felts said. “Whether intentional or not, Trump seems to have decided to run a grand experiment betting that earned media and a cult of personality is more important than grass-roots infrastructure. It’s not how I learned to win elections, but we’ll see who was right on Nov. 8.”

In one sign of a possible problem of enthusiasm in the Republican ranks, there has been a dropoff in mail ballots cast in North Carolina compared with the same period in 2012. Registered Republican mail-in votes are down 58 percent from four years ago, while mail-in votes of Democratic and unaffiliated voters are roughly the same as in 2012, according to political scientist Michael Bitzer’s Old North State Politics blog.

In my book Going Red, I emphasized the need for the GOP to expand its footprint in places like Wake County, NC, and to have a presidential campaign oriented to ground-up, peer-to-peer politicking. As Felts says, we’ll see whether swing states can be won without it, but so far the answer’s not looking very good. And with just two weeks to go, the prospects of a change in those assessments don’t look promising either.

]]>3928609PPP: Not much has changed after the debatehttp://hotair.com/archives/2016/09/29/ppp-not-much-changed-debate/
Thu, 29 Sep 2016 16:01:44 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3924751Rasmussen: Yes, it has.

Did the debate produce a change in the race? According to Democratic pollster PPP, not really — even if a majority of respondents believe Hillary Clinton won it. In their four-way question as well as in their two-way version, Hillary leads Donald Trump by four points … which is about where this series has had the race since both candidates clinched their nominations:

PPP’s new national poll finds Hillary Clinton leading by 4 points both in the full field of candidates, and in a head to head match up with Donald Trump. In the full field she gets 44% to 40% for Trump, 6% for Gary Johnson, 2% for Evan McMullin, and 1% for Jill Stein. She leads Trump 49/45 if voters had to choose just between the two of them.

“We’ve consistently found Hillary Clinton with a national lead in the 3-6 point range since Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination,” said Dean Debnam, President of Public Policy Polling. “She’s never been able to blow the race wide open and she probably never will, but her modest advantage has proven to be quite durable.”

Monday night’s debate was a big success for Clinton. 54% of voters think she won it, to only 31% who think Trump won.

Our latest national telephone and online survey of Likely U.S. Voters finds Clinton with 42% support to Trump’s 41%. Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson earns seven percent (7%) of the vote, while Green Party nominee Jill Stein holds steady at two percent (2%). Three percent (3%) still like some other candidate, and five percent (5%) remain undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Eighty percent (80%) say they are sure which candidate they will vote for, and among these voters, Clinton and Trump are tied with 48% support each. Among voters who say they could still change their minds, it’s Clinton 34%, Trump 33%, Johnson 25% and Stein 8%.

Rasmussen converts its White House Watch poll from weekly to a daily tracking poll after today, by the way.

Getting back to PPP, the sample has a few issues. The age and ethnic demos look realistic, but the partisan balance is 41/34 Democrat, which seems like … a lot of Democrats, even in a presidential election year. The self-described split for the 2012 vote was 50% Obama and 40% Romney, which seems more than a little off from the 51/47 actual result.

However, those demographic issues don’t matter much when looking at the series by itself, where its stability seems to be the most remarkable attribute. It still shows Trump within range of Hillary — in fact, just about within the ±3.2% margin of error. If that’s the case, then the debate win doesn’t matter much for Hillary, and her attack lines didn’t work as intended. That becomes clear in the add-on questions that have become PPP’s hallmark.

Do you think Donald Trump should apologize to Barack Obama for spending 5 years questioning whether he was born in the United States, or not? — 48% yes, 43% no

Do you think it is appropriate or inappropriate for Donald Trump to criticize a former Miss Universe for gaining ‘a massive amount of weight?’ — 17/65

Do you think Donald Trump is as rich as he says he is, or not? — 35/37

Hillary hit Trump and scored points on those questions, and yet … the needle didn’t move at all on the toplines. They planned entire media campaigns on these questions, and it turns out that voters just don’t care about these points when it comes to their vote.

Trump still has another shot at making himself acceptable to more voters in the next two debates. The question will be whether he recognizes the need to prepare enough to deliver on those openings.

]]>3924751Florida poll: Trump leads in four-way race for the first time since the conventionshttp://hotair.com/archives/2016/09/07/florida-poll-trump-leads-four-way-race-first-time-since-conventions/
Thu, 08 Sep 2016 02:41:18 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3921466Tight.

It’s by just a single point, well within the margin of error, but three weeks ago Monmouth had Hillary waltzing away with Florida by nine in the four-way race. A Mason-Dixon poll taken a week after that put her up by two, and now PPP sees Trump nudging ahead. Needless to say, Florida is an all but must-win for Trump in any path to 270, especially if Pennsylvania is going to be a tougher climb for him than everyone thought.

His strategy in Florida is the traditional Republican strategy except even more so: Pile up huge amounts of white votes and then pick off just enough support from Cuban-Americans to eke out a win statewide. It’s working right now:

Much has been made about how Trump will struggle in Florida because of his weakness with minorities and that’s certainly the case. Among non-white voters he trails Clinton by 49 points, getting just 22% to her 71%. But white voters still make up the majority in the state, and with them Trump has a 27 point advantage with them at 60/33. If he’s able to win the white vote by that much, Clinton doesn’t have much chance of running away with the race in Florida. The state will be the same toss up it’s accustomed to being.

Florida might go either way this year but there are signs within the poll that are good news for Democrats’ long term prospects in the state. Among voters under 45 Clinton leads Trump 57/31, and when you extend that to voters under 65 Clinton keeps a 50/41 advantage. It’s only Trump’s 59/39 lead with seniors that keeps things in toss up territory overall, but those voters aren’t going to do Republicans much good 20 or 30 years down the line.

A 60/33 lead among whites is slightly better than Romney’s pace according to the 2012 exit polls, which had him winning that group 61/37. And even slight improvement is a big deal in Florida, where Obama won by just a single point. The newsiest bit from this poll, though, is Hillary’s poor favorable rating. Her numbers have been consistently terrible in state and national polls, but she was reliably a few points ahead of Trump in that metric during August. Not here. His numbers are ever so slightly better — and they’re conspicuously better when it comes to cross-party support.

Nineteen percent of Democrats view Trump favorably. Just four percent of Republicans give Hillary thumbs up. What does that mean in terms of presidential preference? In the four-way race, PPP sees Trump drawing 15 percent of the Democratic vote(!) versus five percent of Republicans crossing over for Hillary. Offhand I can’t remember any poll this year, national or state, showing as much support in one party for the other party’s candidate as Trump is pulling here. Even at the height of her post-convention bounce, I don’t recall Hillary pulling 15 percent of Republicans anywhere.

Another, and related, interesting result is that Trump wins 85 percent of Republicans while Hillary manages just 78 percent of Democrats (thanks, of course, mainly to that 15 percent who are backing Trump). Rarely if ever over the past month has a poll showed Trump stronger within his party than Hillary is within hers. That’s been key to the grumbling about #NeverTrumpers: Supposedly they’re the critical difference in the race because they’re denying Trump the Republican votes he needs to match Hillary’s Democratic support. In this poll, anti-Hillary Dems are a much bigger force than anti-Trump Republicans are, enough so to account for Trump’s small lead overall. By comparison, Obama won 90 percent of Democrats in 2012 per the exit polls while Romney won 92 percent of Republicans. If O had performed any worse, he might have lost the state.

Another way of looking at the favorable ratings is by racial demographics:

Hillary does better among Hispanics but not substantially, and without even cracking 50 percent. Meanwhile she’s getting destroyed among whites as Trump maintains a respectable 50/44 split. On the question of presidential preference, though, it’s among black voters that she’s underperforming most dramatically. She leads among Hispanics 58/33, which is in line with Obama’s 60/39 advantage in the 2012 exit polls. Obama, however, won blacks (who were 13 percent of the electorate) 95/4; Hillary’s winning them 79/8. Any sharp falloff within a group that big in a state this tight is a major problem for Democrats if it holds on Election Day.

As further reading on pollmania, I recommend this short but smart Harry Enten piece on why the race has tightened lately. It has to do in large part with Trump’s more disciplined campaigning, although not so much because the public is necessarily impressed with him as merely because a more “normal” race favors the GOP. Remember, all other things being equal, Republicans probably win this year. The public is restless now that one party has held the White House for eight years and the economy is meh; a generic Republican would have an advantage, especially against a candidate as weak as Hillary. Models have showed this. The problem with Trump is that he turned a campaign that was supposed to be a referendum on her into a referendum on him through his own discipline. He’s remedied that a bit by not doing anything stupid over the past few weeks, making some moderate noises on immigration and racial outreach, doing more teleprompter speeches, and so forth. That gives voters a chance to notice some of the news about the Clinton Foundation’s pay for play and the FBI releasing the notes from Clinton’s interview and to remember that, oh right, Hillary’s a terrible candidate. If Trump sounds semi-coherent at the debates and lays off any self-destructive wisecracks, that’ll normalize the race further in October.

#NeverTrumpers like me have marveled at the fact that the Republican nominee has yet to crack 40 percent in redder-than-red Utah this year, but what gets overlooked is the fact that Hillary Clinton has cracked 27 percent just once. That was in a poll in early June, when she topped out at 35; since then she’s been under 30 in three straight surveys, including this new one from PPP that has Trump up 39/24 with Gary Johnson at 12 percent and Evan McMullin at 9. Look back at the state’s recent presidential history and you’ll find that the best a Democrat has managed to do there is Obama in 2008, when he pulled 34 percent of the vote. That may be the party’s ceiling in Utah, in which case the only way Hillary has a shot to win is if, implausibly, Johnson and McMullin continue to build on their numbers until they’re pulling fully a third of the electorate between them — and all of their gains would need to come at Trump’s expense, not at each other’s. Anyone think a 34/33/33 Democratic win is realistically in the offing?

Trump’s going to win the state but it’s worth noting how tremendously unpopular he is there. In fact, as gruesome as this PPP poll is for him, it represents his best topline number there so far this year. Previously his best showing had been, um, 37 percent. In Utah.

In a year where much has been made of voters not liking their choices for President, there’s probably nowhere that’s truer than Utah. Donald Trump has a 31/61 favorability rating in the state. That makes him the popular candidate there, by comparison, as Hillary Clinton comes in at 23/72…

Much has been made of Trump’s unpopularity with Mormons and certainly that’s a real thing- only 33% of Mormons see him favorably to 56% with an unfavorable opinion. But that still puts him in much better position than Clinton who comes in at 12/84 with Mormons. When it comes to the horse race Clinton is actually tied for third among Mormons in the state- Trump gets 44%, McMullin 13%, and Clinton and Johnson tie for third at 12%…

Even in a state where Trump’s up big, problems loom for him in the polls. 65% of voters in the state think he needs to release his tax returns, to only 22% who don’t think it’s necessary for him to. That issue continues to pose doubts about him for voters, and even among his own supporters 44% think he needs to release them with only 36% saying he doesn’t need to. Only 39% of voters think Trump can be trusted with nuclear weapons, to 48% who think he can’t be. Trump’s losing his battle with the media- by a double digit margin (45/34) voters say that the New York Times is more respectable than Trump is.

If you’re feelin’ McMullinmania, note that his favorable rating in Utah at the moment is 17/10, with fully 73 percent saying they don’t know enough yet to form an opinion. In two months, with more face time and public awareness of his social conservatism and LDS pedigree, he’ll probably pass Johnson statewide. (He’s only three points behind him right now and, per the excerpt, already leads him among Mormons, with the two of them combining for fully 25 percent of the LDS vote.) I wonder how Tim Kaine as Democratic nominee would be faring against Trump in Utah. He wouldn’t have a 23/72 election-destroying favorable rating to overcome, safe to say.

Incidentally, as PPP is known for tucking trollish questions into its polls, it followed a question about McMullin’s favorable rating with a question about “Sausage McMuffins.” Favorable rating: 33/25. McDonald’s tasty breakfast treat would have a decent shot at cracking double digits against Trump in Utah.

One X factor in all of this: What happens to McMullin’s numbers if Mitt Romney were to endorse him? A Romney endorsement of Clinton is out of the question (I think) but an endorsement of McMullin really might get some reluctant Trump supporters there to reconsider. It’s all a question of how willing Mitt is to try to sabotage the GOP nominee. I remember reading during the primaries that he held off on endorsing Rubio because at no point was he convinced that Rubio had a legitimate chance to win. Romney wasn’t going to spend some of his political capital on a gesture. McMullin might be in the same Catch-22 — he needs Romney’s help to boost his profile and gain traction in the polls, but Romney might not be willing to help until McMullin’s profile is higher and he has some traction in the polls. And even if Romney goes to bat for him, what would be achieved by Trump winning the state 33/27/20/12 over Clinton, McMullin, and Johnson, respectively? If you’re going to intervene to damage your own party’s electoral chances, you’d better be very sure there’s something concrete to be gained by doing so.

One other tidbit from PPP’s crosstabs: 65 percent(!) of Trump’s voters in Utah say that a Clinton victory would necessarily be due to voter fraud. Another poll recently also found Trump fans eager to believe a Hillary win means the election was rigged. The person within Team Trump to watch on that is Kellyanne Conway, who — I think — would not betray her training as a pollster and go along with Trump’s fantasy about a sham result if he loses in November. She’ll say he lost fair and square, at which point Trumpers will tear her apart as some sort of Cruz-backed saboteur who was probably part of the rigging. November will fun. By the way, there’s news on the wire today about Hillary Clinton opening a new state office in … Utah, despite the fact that she can’t break 30 percent there. I don’t think she’s under any illusions about winning. I think that’s more a form of psy ops designed to spook Trump into believing he needs to defend the state. Will he take the bait?

No matter how bad things get in October, you can count on the big guy to have some quality new material about “Lyin’ Ted” at his rallies.

A new poll suggests there is at least one fellow Republican who could unseat U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018: Rick Perry.

The former Texas governor would beat Cruz by 9 percentage points, according to the forthcoming survey from the Democratic-leaning firm Public Policy Polling. Set to be released later today, the poll found Perry would get 46 percent of the vote and Cruz 37 percent, with 18 percent saying they are not sure whom they would support…

In general, the poll shows Texas Republicans want Cruz to be their candidate for Senate again in 2018 — but not overwhelmingly. Fifty percent said they would like Cruz to be the nominee, while 43 percent said would like someone else to carry the banner.

Cruz would easily defeat two lesser-known challengers, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Rep. Mike McCaul, but that may be a function of pure name recognition. Perry, a two-time presidential candidate and three-term governor, doesn’t have that problem. Not only does he lead Cruz by nine overall, he’s actually significantly ahead among Republicans, 49/35. (Cruz wins by eight among independents.) In fact, against Patrick and McCaul Cruz is polling right around the 50 percent mark, meaning that in theory either challenger could make the race competitive as they become better known.

How’s Perry doing it? Simple. He’s considerably more popular right now among GOPers than Cruz is, no doubt due to Cruz’s non-endorsement of Trump at the convention. Once you include Democrats (who view Perry and Cruz unfavorably to an almost equal degree), Cruz’s overall approval rating is upside-down in his home state:

Perry’s favorable rating among Republicans is 74/17. John Cornyn’s approval rating, by comparison to Cruz’s, is 34/31 overall and 55/16 among Republicans. Even all of that could conceivably be spun to Cruz’s benefit by noting that, however he may stack up against other Texans, at least he’s still more popular there than Trump is. Texans might not have appreciated a pointed show of disloyalty in Cruz’s speech, but “bad soldier for the party” doesn’t necessarily mean a preference for Trump over Cruz.

This result, however, does pretty much mean that. Et tu, Texas?

That’s a remarkable result given that Cruz won the Texas primary by 17 points and doubtless would have crossed 50 percent had Marco Rubio not been in the race at the time. You could dismiss it, I guess, by assuming that people must have interpreted the question as asking if they’d prefer to replace Trump with Cruz today, with less than three months until Election Day. That transition would be so chaotic, with Cruz caught flat-footed, that you’d be better off sticking with Trump and hoping that he figures out a way to make magic. Even so, this poll was conducted less than a week ago, with the news overflowing with stories about national polls showing Trump in the toilet. At the height of panic about the GOP nominee, when asked whether they’d have Trump or the native Texan who won the state going away five months ago, Texans choose … Trump, by 17 points? Geez. Note to self: Apparently, there are few things more alienating that you can say to Republican voters than “vote your conscience.”

One intriguing subplot to the post-convention polls has been that some attractive purple states like Pennsylvania and New Hampshire have broken sharply blue while others like Florida and Ohio have remained close-ish, with Clinton out to a comfortable but hardly decisive 4-5 point lead. That’s been a minor comfort to Trump’s campaign over the last few hard weeks. With Ohio and Florida within striking distance, he could focus on solving the major problem he’s having right now in Pennsylvania.

If you believe this new survey from Monmouth, though, Florida has begun to go sideways too. Not only does Clinton now lead by nine, she’s at 48 percent in a four-way race, her best number yet in the state and several points better than she does nationally in a four-way race. Monmouth is a highly regarded pollster too, rated A+ by FiveThirtyEight. Which raises an important question: What are we going to blog about until November now that the election’s no longer remotely suspenseful?

Clinton has an overwhelming lead among Hispanic, black and Asian voters who make up about one-third of the electorate, garnering 69% of this group’s vote to 19% for Trump. Trump leads among white voters by 51% to 37%, but there is a significant gender split. Among white men, Trump has a 64% to 24% advantage. Among white women, Clinton leads by 49% to 39%. There is no difference by educational attainment, with Trump ahead among white voters without a college degree (51% to 39%) as well as white college graduates (50% to 36%).

Clinton’s 50 point lead among non-white voters is similar to Barack Obama’s advantage over Mitt Romney with this group four years ago (49 points according to the 2012 Florida exit poll). Trump’s 14 point lead among white voters is smaller than Romney’s 24 point win with this group. This difference is due mainly to a widening gender gap. Trump is doing somewhat better than Romney did among white men (+40 points compared to +32), but much worse among white women (-10 points compared to +17).

A week ago, Quinnipiac found Florida dead even at 43 thanks to Trump’s superior performance among white voters. The same poll had Clinton up big in Pennsylvania thanks to her lead there among white college graduates, but there was no similar educational split among whites in Florida. Trump led across educational strata. Interestingly, Monmouth is seeing the same thing here — Trump leads among whites with and without a college diploma — but he trails badly overall thanks to Hillary cutting deeply into his support among white women. Trump has to win whites overwhelmingly to offset Clinton’s enormous lead among nonwhites. The more secondary demographic criteria come into play to dilute that support (education, gender, suburbanites, etc), the more trouble he’s in. As a related example, ABC finds Trump leading nationally by a mammoth 68/27 margin among white men without a college degree, the sort of lead that would give him a legit chance of winning if he could replicate Romney’s numbers with other groups. But he can’t: Among college-educated white women, a group Romney won narrowly, Trump trails Hillary by 20 points. I said last week somewhere that all Republican nominees are niche candidates insofar as they rely heavily on whites but Trump is a niche-within-a-niche candidate because he relies extremely heavily on only certain white subgroups. That’s truer than ever, and it’s the path to electoral ruin.

The other major distinction between Monmouth’s numbers and Quinnipiac’s is the partisan split. Quinnipiac had Trump winning Republicans 90/5 in Florida versus Clinton winning Democrats 86/7. There were more Dems crossing over for him than there were Republicans crossing over for her. Monmouth has that upside down: Clinton wins Dems 92/4 while Trump wins Republicans 79/12, putting her in double digits here among Trump’s own party. Independents, meanwhile, are a bloodbath. Clinton wins them 47/30 in Monmouth’s survey versus a 37/36 lead in Quinnipiac’s. Either one of these polls is off or something has shifted dramatically in Florida over the past week. Worth noting, though: Monmouth’s sample is actually more favorable to Trump than it might have been. They have it 35R/30D/35I; the exit poll in 2012 was 35D/33R/33I. If the electorate is as blue as that this fall, presumably Clinton will win by double digits.

While we’re chattering about polls, here’s another new one out today from left-leaning PPP. Trump is clinging to a six-point lead … in Texas:

A Democratic victory in Texas this year remains a stretch but within the numbers there are signs of Democrats being positioned to become seriously competitive there in the years ahead. Trump’s lead is based entirely on his holding a 63-33 advantage among seniors. With voters under 65, Clinton leads him 49-45. And when you look just specifically at voters under 45, Clinton leads Trump 60-35. Older voters are overwhelmingly responsible for the Republican advantage in Texas, and generational change is likely to help Democrats become more competitive.

A big piece of that generational change is the increasing racial diversity of the electorate in Texas. Trump has a 69/25 lead with white voters but the reason the state’s so competitive overall is that among non-white voters Clinton has a 73-21 lead, including a 68-27 edge with the state’s booming Hispanic population.

Texas isn’t a purple state yet, but it’s getting purpler. And a niche-within-a-niche candidate is poised to make it purpler this year than it should be. Texas may end up being the starkest example of a state Trump wins only because there are so many older, white staunchly Republican voters there that he simply can’t give enough votes away to lose. We’ll find out.

Via BuzzFeed, here’s Florida Rep. Carlos Curbelo wondering how the race would look any different if Trump was actively trying to lose. Relatedly, Trump will be campaigning in deep blue Michigan this Friday while Mike Pence is in deep blue New Mexico today. Why they’re wasting time in places like that instead of spending it in Florida, I have no idea. In lieu of an exit question, note that Marco Rubio remains five points ahead of his Democratic Senate challenger in Monmouth’s poll despite the fact that the state increasingly looks like a blowout for Hillary. He’s running 14 points ahead of Trump right now, defying the conventional wisdom about how much damage a Democratic landslide might do to Senate candidates. I assume that’s because Rubio’s name recognition at home is unusually high thanks to his presidential campaign, as well as because he clashed sharply with Trump on the trail in March, which distinguishes him sharply from the nominee in voters’ minds. There isn’t a lot of overlap between “Trump Republicans” and “Rubio Republicans,” so if you’re a righty in Florida who prefers Hillary or a third-party candidate to Trump, it’s probably easier to switch and support Rubio for Senate than it is for, say, a New Hampshire Republican who dislikes Trump to switch for Ayotte. That’ll be sweet revenge of a sort for Rubio if he hangs on while Trump gets wiped out. Having been humiliated by Trump in the Florida primary and dismissed this past spring as the guy who can’t win anywhere, he may end up proving himself the more durable candidate in a swing-state general election. Just as his fans claimed he’d be during the primaries.

A strange but true fact. Although everyone understands that the election will boil down to Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, with Trump needing a clean sweep to have a real chance at national victory, there’s been exactly one poll of Florida and Ohio since the Democratic convention. (That was a Suffolk poll of Florida a week ago, which showed Clinton up six.) You would think pollsters would be churning constantly in those three states, given their significance. Instead it’s one national poll after another, which are important as indicia of broad trends but ultimately meaningless compared to the FL/OH/PA trifecta. More state polls from the big three, please.

On the other hand, why bother spending money to poll all three states if Trump is slipping behind decisively in any one of them? He needs all three. If Pennsylvania goes sideways, Florida and Ohio don’t matter. With this new survey from Susquehanna, we now have three PA polls taken after both conventions. Results: Clinton by four, Clinton by 11, and now Clinton by nine, with Susquehanna finding Hillary ahead 46/37 in a four-way race. (A fourth recent poll of the state by Suffolk, taken during the Democratic convention, also had Clinton by nine.) All four are polls of likely voters. What now?

Lee said he was surprised by the results considering the poll also showed that jobs and the economy and national security were listed as the most important issues facing the nation. Additionally, 56 percent of respondents feel the nation is on the wrong track. All of those things should push voters to the outsider, Donald Trump, Lee said.

But perhaps the answer is in likeability. When asked their opinion of Hillary Clinton, 49 percent said they view her unfavorably and 40 percent had a favorable opinion.

Donald Trump had a 57 percent unfavorable and just 35 percent favorable view of him.

“We know to a large extent voting for President is voting for someone you can identify with, that you like,” Lee said. “That’s gonna be a tough thing to overcome if he can’t improve his image in this state.”

Before the “unskewing” analyses begin, note that Susquehanna has Pat Toomey trailing by just two points in his Senate race. The two other most recent polls of the state had Toomey trailing by a point and ahead by a point. Not good for an incumbent, but also proof that these polls don’t have an across-the-board Democratic tilt. Trump is simply running behind Toomey — far behind, in fact. Susquehanna’s sample is also interesting in that it has near parity between the parties, with 35 percent Democrats versus 33 percent Republicans. That’s wildly different from the partisan make-up of the Pennsylvania electorate in 2012, when the state was 45 percent Democrats versus 35 percent Republicans. It’s true that PA has been drifting redder in party registrations over the past four years, which would account for some of the change, but 10 points is a big shift. It’s possible that Susquehanna is lowballing Clinton’s lead by underestimating how many Democrats will turn out on Election Day.

Brandon Finnigan, who runs Decision Deck HQ and who’s been beating the drum for years now about Pennsylvania being a ripe pick-up opportunity for the GOP (here’s his magnum opus on the subject), posted this comparison over time this morning to capture his despair:

If you’d still rather look at national polls, the latest comes from NBC News and SurveyMonkey, a poll that used to favor Trump earlier in the race (possibly because Trump fans feel freer to indicate their true preference in anonymous online surveys than in conversations with live pollsters), but which has gone sour for him lately. Their last poll was conducted during the Democratic convention and had Hillary up eight points, but some dismissed that at the time as evidence of a convention bounce. Two weeks later, they have her gaining a couple of points in the interim: It’s now Clinton 51, Trump 41, thanks to some of Trump’s base beginning to peel off.

Trump also regularly has an advantage among white men. Trump has been 23 points ahead of Clinton among white men over the past two weeks, 58 percent to 35 percent. But that support is down from a 31-point margin among white men in Trump’s favor during the week of the Republican National Convention…

White evangelicals are traditionally a very strong voting bloc for Republicans. Trump lost momentum even among that group. He went from a 60-point advantage in early July to a 49-point advantage in the latest results — 71 percent to 22 percent. While an overwhelming majority of white evangelicals still support him, the decline in support among that group is evidence that Trump has lost traction even among the most steadfast Republican demographic groups.

That’s a poll of registered voters, not likelies, but the sample is enormous at over 11,000 people, meaning a margin of error of just 1.2 points. It’s also the second poll in the last week to put Clinton at 50 percent or better. Trailing by any margin, let alone a double-digit margin, is trouble, but if the person leading is stuck in the low 40s, all you need to do to pass her is win undecideds. If Hillary starts polling 50+ reliably, it’ll mean that Trump can only win by going a step further and prying loose votes that have already been committed to her. He’ll have one golden opportunity to do that next month, per these Susquehanna numbers:

If he was thinking seriously of skipping the debates before, he isn’t anymore. He has no choice. He needs a gamechanger.

One last note. A few readers have been emailing us this Gallup data on party identification as evidence that, yes indeed, all of the polls are skewed in vastly overestimating the number of Democrats in the electorate. Gallup has it 28D/28R/42I, with an even 43D/43R split if you include “leaners.” That’s interesting, but I don’t know why anyone would assume that Gallup is necessarily right and the great bulk of other pollsters, which are seeing a 36D/29R split in HuffPo’s poll average, are wrong. If 10 polls see one result and one poll sees something very different, why trust the outlier unless you’re emotionally invested in believing it? Also, if you scroll back through Gallup’s data to 2012, you’ll see that the GOP led in party identification (47/45) as late as late July of that year. Usually you don’t see party identification shift decisively towards the winner of the election until the home stretch of the race. And finally, it’s no great surprise that party ID would be harder to gauge this year since there are strongly dissatisfied cohorts on both sides, conservative anti-Trumpers on the right and Berniebros on the left. Some of these people have already left their parties in disgust at their respective establishments but will nonetheless feel compelled to vote for the party nominee because they despise the other party’s choice. If it’s true, as some polls recently have showed, that Clinton is picking up more Republicans than Trump is picking up Democrats, that alone might explain her big lead even if you believe party ID is close.

A troll-poll classic from PPP to make you feel good about the state of your country this Independence Day weekend. Too bad they didn’t offer more than one extinction-event scenario, though. We all know that if “zombie apocalypse” had listened to its family and decided to run this year, it would have cracked 20 percent easy.

You don’t have to say it, Trump fans. I know: “A vote for the meteor is a vote for Hillary Clinton.”

Independents are the only hope for America’s future. Meanwhile, when we look at the results by age, we find Trump still leading the prospect of mass extinction by meteor among young adults — but the meteor’s within, er, striking distance:

The other interesting bit from the crosstabs on this one are the responses when people are asked how they feel about a hypothetical “Texit,” i.e. Texas seceding from the United States a la Britain withdrawing from the European Union. I would have guessed that the numbers among Democrats would be low — you ain’t going nowhere, rebs — while the numbers for Republicans would be high. A free and independent red-state paradise in the heart of cowboy country? What’s not to like?

But I would have guessed wrong. The partisan loyalties actually run the opposite way here. For many Republicans the thought process seems to be, “Why the hell would we want to get rid of Texas?” Whereas for many Democrats it’s “GO. GO NOW.”

There’s an … interesting racial result on that question too. Texas independence isn’t a thing now, but how about 50 years from now when the state population is much more Latino?

Hopefully the United States will enjoy peaceful relations with the Republic of Aztlan for many generations to come.

Elsewhere today, in a finding that’s certainly not related in any way to the presidential election, Gallup reports that the number of American adults who say they’re “extremely proud” of their country has reached a 15-year low. Exit question: Who are the seven percent in PPP’s survey who are “not sure” when asked to choose between Clinton, Trump, and a giant meteor colliding with Earth?

Consider this a Rorschach poll, especially in the context of the swing-state reports of late in the presidential race. Democratic leaning pollster PPP has the first survey of Pennsylvania in over a month, a state Donald Trump’s campaign says it will win but which has gone Democratic since 1988. Readers who like Trump’s chances will feel pretty good about the toplines, but they come with some caveats as well:

Clinton has 41% to 40% for Trump, with Gary Johnson at 6% and Jill Stein at 3%. In a head to head match up, Clinton and Trump tie at 44%. Similarly to what we found on the Florida poll we released yesterday, Republicans are more unified around Trump (79/8) than Democrats are around Clinton (75/15). That dynamic is what’s making the state competitive.

Democrats lead a generic ballot question for President 45/41, which is pretty similar to Barack Obama’s margin of victory in the state in 2012. Bernie Sanders has a substantial advantage over Trump, 45/36, with Johnson at 5% and Stein at 1%. In a head to head contest Sanders leads Trump 51/39.

To recall a point made in my earlier post, Obama won Pennsylvania by more than five points, 52/46.6 against Romney four years ago. The best any Republican has done since 1988, when George H. W. Bush became the most recent Republican to win the state, was his son’s 48.5% in 2004 — still 2.5 points behind John Kerry. And that was as an incumbent; George W. Bush only got to Romney’s level in 2000, with just 46.4% of the vote. Republicans don’t get blown out in Pennsylvania, except maybe in 2008, but they generally don’t compete well there either.

Being within a point of Clinton in the three-way race puts Trump closer than any other GOP candidate’s final outcome since 1988, and that’s a potentially encouraging sign. However, we’re not at the general election yet, and Trump’s share of the poll still comes up short of John McCain’s 44.3% in 2008. Remember, Trump’s been campaigning for over a year and has been the presumptive Republican nominee for almost a month. He should be well known, and his support solid. Solid at 44% is not a very good position in a two way race under these circumstances.

As PPP notes, the division within the Democratic bloc makes this an uneven comparison, too. If Hillary fixes that unity disparity, suddenly she polls at 47/40, which would be the worst gap for the GOP in PA since 2008. Perhaps a signal of what that might look like comes in the head-to-heads with Bernie Sanders and Trump, which Sanders leads by wide margins at 45/36/5 (with Johnson) and 51/39 in the two-way race. Trump doesn’t draw enough from the Sanders bloc to go ahead even with the sharp division still festering among Democrats, and when that bitterness winds down, Trump will draw even less from it.

There is one other caveat, albeit small. The sample does have a 49/41 split on the 2012 vote for Obama, slightly larger than the 5.4-point final gap, so this may be a bit friendlier to Hillary, but … that’s not much of a difference. Even with the results from Luzerne, there isn’t much evidence that Trump changes the situation in Pennsylvania for Republicans. At least, not so far.

The primaries for both parties take a turn northeast tomorrow, with five states ready to weigh in on the presidential election. On the Republican side, a polling consensus shows Donald Trump ready to have a big night, even as Ted Cruz and John Kasich announce an anti-Trump alliance. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton only has Bernie Sanders standing between her and the nomination — but a new poll by Democratic pollster PPP suggests he may be more than she can handle:

New Public Policy Polling surveys in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island conducted on behalf of VoteVets.Org Action Fund find the Democratic race for President in those states competitive, while on the Republican side Donald Trump is headed for blowout victories across the board.

The Democratic races in Connecticut and Rhode Island appear to be toss ups, with Clinton and Sanders each having a slight advantage in one of the states. In Connecticut Clinton has a narrow edge at 48/46, thanks in large part to a 63/24 advantage among African Americans. In Rhode Island it’s Sanders who has a 49/45 lead. Clinton’s up 54/40 with actual Democrats there, but Sanders is up 67/28 among independents planning to vote in the Democratic primary and that gives him the overall lead. Clinton has a wider lead in Pennsylvania at 51/41, although that still represents a closer race than most public polls have shown over the last few weeks.

What should have Democrats most worried is Hillary’s performance among women. In Connecticut, she only leads Sanders among women by four points, 48/44. She does better in Pennsylvania at 56/32, but Hillary’s back to a four-point advantage in Rhode Island at 49/45. Basically, the vote among women appears to mainly reflect the consensus in these states rather than drive outcomes — and that’s among Democratic primary voters. Democratic hopes that Hillary can use women to drive a general-election outcome seem ill-founded.

On the other hand, PPP’s data might give Democrats some relief from anxiety about age demographics. She’s viewed positively by 18-45YO Democratic primary voters, although not enthusiastically so (50/40 in CT, 60/26 in PA, 52/35 in RI) even while Sanders generally outperforms her among these voters. Keep a couple of caveats in mind, however. First, the age demo in the PPP poll is pretty wide; Barack Obama drove his coalition with the energy of under-30 voters. Also, these are Democratic primary voters, not general-election voters, although Republicans generally don’t do well in that demographic in any case. If they aren’t enthusiastic about Hillary, then they won’t tend to turn out and especially volunteer for GOTV activities. That will be a problem in the general election, and not just in the presidential race.

PPP also polled Republicans in tomorrow’s contests. Those surveys showed no surprises:

Things aren’t nearly so competitive on the Republican side, with Donald Trump getting a majority of voters in each state. He’s strongest in Rhode Island where he gets 61% to 23% for John Kasich, and 13% for Ted Cruz. The numbers are very similar in Connecticut with Trump getting 59% to 25% for Kasich, and 13% for Cruz. Things are a little bit different in Pennsylvania where Trump’s share of the vote isn’t as high (51%) and Cruz edges out Kasich 25/22 for second place. None of these states are particularly amenable to the ‘Never Trump’ movement. Trump has the highest favorability rating of the GOP candidates in each state, and also handily wins head to head match ups with Cruz and Kasich in all three states. One thing that comes across in all these places is how unpopular Cruz is- he’s way under water even with Republican primary voters.

Let’s not forget that these are states where Republicans traditionally are not competitive in the general election, so the impact on November from favorability ratings will be minimal. That’s not true of the Democrats in these states, though … which is why they should be worried about nominating Hillary, and why they’re probably hoping that Republicans shoot themselves in the foot.

This makes two polls in as many days showing Cruz out to a 10-point lead in WI. Yesterday Marquette had it Cruz 40, Trump 30, Kasich 21. This one was conducted between Monday and Wednesday of this week, which means it was done entirely after the National Enquirer story about Cruz broke big online. (Scott Walker endorsed Cruz on Tuesday, so some but not all of the data here may reflect fallout from that.) If the Enquirer thing is hurting him, there’s no evidence in the polling.

Among just those who say they will “definitely” vote, Cruz’s lead over Trump widens to 46-33 percent, and Kasich gets 16 percent.

There is a big gender gap. Women back Cruz over Trump by a 19-point margin (46-27 percent). The two candidates are much closer among men: Cruz gets 40 percent to Trump’s 35 percent…

Independents can vote in Wisconsin’s open primary — and are more inclined to back Trump (37 percent) than Cruz (26 percent) or Kasich (26 percent).

It’s an open primary, non-Republicans are breaking for Trump, and Cruz … still leads by double digits. Huh. The margin here is a big deal because Wisconsin is winner-take-all by congressional district, not winner-take-all statewide. (24 delegates will be awarded by district and another 18 to the state winner overall.) The bigger Cruz’s lead is, the more that suggests he’s apt to perform strongly in multiple districts, not just the reddest, which means he’ll clean up in delegates. Another poll of Wisconsin released today by PPP showed Cruz leading by just one point, 38/37, but his lead widened to eight points when those polled were asked to choose between him and Trump exclusively, without Kasich as an option. That suggests Cruz’s lead could widen there as late deciders break from Kasich towards Cruz.

The newsiest part here, though, is the gender gap. Yesterday Marquette found Cruz leading among women by 15 points. PPP, despite seeing a tight race, also has Cruz ahead among women comfortably by seven points. Fox Business has him up by 19 points. There may be a difference of opinion on the state of the race overall but not over which candidate women prefer, which also confounds the idea that the Enquirer story is hurting him. On the contrary, Cruz is playing up his advantage by holding events in Wisconsin aimed specifically at women this week. All he needs to do to win the state, realistically, is hold his own with Trump among men and Republican women will put him over the top. That’s what makes the polls this week so interesting — if the gender gap here is part of a broader shift among women nationally against Trump and towards Cruz, Trump is going to have more trouble making it to 1,237 than anyone thought. He’ll still win his home state of New York in a blowout on April 19th, but that’s always been a foregone conclusion. The question is what happens after that. Are Republican women going to take Trump down before Cleveland?

One more data point worth chewing on. Note the third-party figure for GOPers:

Fox Business didn’t poll Trump’s favorable numbers but Marquette did — 22/70 among the overall electorate, if you can believe it. It takes a lot of anti-Trump Republicans to produce a number like that. That’s also a dagger to a theory being popularized by some Trump fans like Ann Coulter that he’s going to run up the score so high with white voters in key swing states in November that he’ll flip some states Romney lost from blue to red. For one thing, Romney actually performed quite well with whites in key swing states; Trump would have to somehow improve on those numbers and also not do anything in the process that bleeds votes from other key demographics. Gaining a vote from a white man who didn’t vote for Romney in 2012 doesn’t help if you’ve also alienated a white woman who did vote for Romney. All you’re doing there is exchanging one vote for another, not building on Romney’s take — and bear in mind, even among white men, WaPo has Trump pulling a 51 percent unfavorable rating(!!) right now. Beyond all that, though, one of the swing states Coulter’s targeting for Trump via the white vote is, er … Wisconsin, where he currently trails Hillary by 10 points in Marquette’s poll and by 14 in the Fox Business poll. That’s a deep hole to climb out of, especially for a candidate who’s very unpopular. How’s he getting from 22/70 favorables in Wisconsin to winning 70 percent of the white vote or whatever crazy number he’d need to take the state?

When was the last time Rubio had a poll this good? His top priority on Saturday night is finishing ahead of Cruz if possible, which would turbo-charge the media’s “Rubio comeback!” narrative. Failing that, he’ll happily accept third if Jeb Bush does so badly that his donors finally give up on him, clearing the way for Rubio to become the center-right choice in the race. According to PPP, Rubio’s got a shot at both: He’s tied with Cruz at 18 percent in a state that Cruz is supposed to do no worse than second in and Bush 2016 is on death watch at just seven percent here, tied with Ben Carson for fifth place. Trump’s going to win South Carolina, but the “electable” alternative may wake up on Sunday morning with his supporters newly energized and his “lane” suddenly clear ahead of Nevada.

The question is, if we did end up with a Trump/Rubio contest — and it’s hard to see how, given Cruz’s willingness and ability to run his race to the end — would the “electable” guy actually win? Trump’s numbers look awfully solid:

What’s striking about Trump’s support is how consistent it is across different demographic groups- he’s at 41% with ‘somewhat conservative’ voters, 40% with younger voters, 38% with men, 36% with self identified Republicans, 35% with Evangelicals, 35% with middle aged voters, 34% with non-Evangelicals, 31% with women, 30% with self identified independents, 30% with ‘very conservative’ voters, 30% with seniors, and 29% with moderates. He has a lead of some size within every single one of those groups, similar to what he was able to do in New Hampshire…

There’s been a lot of speculation that Trump might take on water after attacking George W. Bush on Saturday night, and Bush is relatively popular with 64% of voters seeing him favorably to 25% who have an unfavorable opinion. But despite his comments Trump is still leading even among voters with a positive view of GWB– he gets 26% to 22% for Cruz, 20% for Rubio, and 10% for Jeb Bush. And Trump is dominant with the swath of voters that doesn’t like George W. Bush, getting 57% to 12% for Kasich, and 11% each for Cruz and Rubio.

I’m going to take that as temporary vindication in the debate over whether Trump’s claim that Bush “lied” about WMDs Iraq is a problem or not. In a hypothetical three-way race in SC between Trump, Rubio, and Cruz, Trump ticks up to 40 percent while Rubio leaps to 28 percent, with Cruz a few points behind at 22 percent. In a hypothetical two-way race, Trump leads Cruz by 10, 48/38, but he leads Rubio by just one, 46/45. The reason is obvious: Center-right voters backing Bush and Kasich strongly prefer Rubio to Trump (and Cruz) and so they unite behind him when forced to choose. That’s good news for Rubio vis-a-vis Cruz but great news for Trump, who’s built enough support in the sort of evangelical-heavy state that’s supposed to look dimly at him that he could, in theory, now beat even Mr. Electable Marco Rubio head to head. It’s taken for granted among some anti-Trump conservatives that the only thing keeping Trump alive at this point is the deep divisions among the rest of the party between Rubio, Cruz, Bush, and Kasich, but what if that isn’t as true as it used to be? What if Trump is now sufficiently attractive even to Republicans outside of his hardcore base that a match race between him and Rubio, the candidate who’s capable of appealing to the right and to the center, would essentially be a dead heat? This is why there’s good reason to believe that it really will be too late to stop Trump once he has another couple of wins under his belt. If he gains credibility with each victory, then wins in SC and in the SEC primary on March 1 may leave even Rubio at a durable disadvantage that’ll be hard to reverse later.

The other big news from this poll, which is flying below the radar in write-ups about it, is Cruz’s favorable rating. Hoo boy:

That 42/48 split is the worst in the field, and the only numbers that are underwater among the six remaining Republicans. Cruz’s favorables were strong all through the second half of 2015, when, at one point, he was actually the most popular candidate in the field among Republicans. But that was ephemeral: Partly it was due to Cruz receiving high marks from Trump fans while their “bromance” was still in full bloom. Ever since Trump and Cruz went to war in January, Cruz’s favorables have been slipping and now PPP has them upside down. I think this is an outlier but there’s a chance that it isn’t given that (a) Trump is attacking Cruz relentlessly as a liar and a cheat in the media now and (b) Cruz has gone strongly negative against Trump and Rubio lately, which may be driving down perceptions of him. (It’s a weird irony that, among other candidates’ supporters, the only one that still rates Cruz favorably on balance is Ben Carson’s, whose campaign has been crying about Cruz’s “dirty trick” in Iowa two weeks ago.) Pay attention to other SC polls this week. If you see Cruz consistently pulling favorables that are lower than everyone else’s then he suddenly has a major, maybe insurmountable problem in trying to win a three-way race with Trump and Rubio — and maybe even a two-man race with Trump.

In lieu of an exit question, take a minute to scroll down to pages 12-15 of PPP’s crosstabs and note the difference between Trump’s (and, to a lesser extent, Cruz’s) voters and everyone else’s voters on a variety of cultural issues. I’ll leave you with these three as a sample:

Cruz’s numbers here aren’t a shock — he’s been in the high teens and low twenties for awhile — but Trump hasn’t dipped as low as 25 percent in a national poll since November and Rubio hasn’t seen a number as high as 21 percent since … ever. That makes some righty poll-watchers nervous since PPP’s credibility has been attacked in the past. Not only are they liberal, they were the subject of a famous critique of their methodology by Nate Cohn in TNR a few years ago. If you’re looking to throw out this result, which no other pollster has captured, there you go. On the other hand, RCP finds them credible enough to include them in their poll average. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight site also deems PPP worthy of being rated (a B- for accuracy). I’ve been writing up their polls all primary season long, including ones that showed Trump soaring. If you accepted their other polls at face value, why start ignoring them now?

It’s true, national polls are almost totally worthless — but that never stopped Trump from crowing about them at his rallies, and after a surprising result in Iowa they can be helpful in detecting whether there really has been a change in voter sentiment that might show up next week in New Hampshire. If you believe PPP, Marcomentum is real and Trump may well be on his way down the drain.

Trump’s 25% standing reflects a 9 point drop from our last national poll, which was taken the week before Christmas. It reflects an overall decline in Trump’s popularity with GOP voters. Trump’s favorability has dropped a net 17 points, from a previous +24 standing at 58/34 to now just +7 at 48/41.Trump is particularly starting to struggle on the right- he’s dropped to 3rd place with ‘very conservative’ voters at 19% with Cruz at 34% and Rubio at 22% outpacing him with that group. He does still lead with moderates and ‘somewhat conservative’ voters to give him the overall advantage.

Rubio is the candidate with the real momentum in the race. He’s up 8 points from his 13% standing in our poll right before Christmas. Beyond that he’s seen a large spike in his favorability rating- it’s improved a net 28 points from +15 at 49/34 to +43 at 64/21. That ties him with Ben Carson as being the most broadly popular candidate on the Republican side.

Things also bode well for Rubio as the field gets smaller in the coming weeks. In a four candidate field he gets 32% to 31% for Trump, 23% for Cruz, and 8% for Bush. In a three candidate field he gets 34% to 33% for Trump and 25% for Cruz. And in head to heads he leads both Trump (52/40) and Cruz (46/40). As other candidates drop out of the race Rubio is the most likely destination of their supporters.

All of those numbers will change yet again, of course, if Trump holds on in New Hampshire, which I think he will. The table below isn’t good for him, though. Bear in mind that Cruz and Rubio are both net favorable among nearly every other candidate’s supporters, meaning that if either one of them ends up in a two-man race with Trump, they’re looking good:

Rubio also does well as the second choice of supporters of Jeb Bush and John Kasich, both of whom are likely to be out soon:

On the other hand, Cruz cleans up among fans of Ben Carson, who’s also likely to be out soon. Interestingly, Christie fans prefer Cruz to Rubio as a second choice, which may be the product of butthurt over his fade in New Hampshire or may be statistical noise due to a small subsample.

One more result for you. Here’s what happens when other candidates’ voters are forced to choose between Rubio and Cruz.

I remind you again that national polls are useless, as Cruz will/would obviously do better than these numbers in his southern strongholds, which are coming up on March 1st. (Much better if Trump’s not in the race at that point.) Don’t forget, though, that Rubio’s playing a long game, eyeing the more moderate electorates that’ll show up for winner-take-all primaries when blue-state Republicans start voting later this spring. He may outperform these numbers in those strongholds, which will be trouble for Cruz.

But that’s all too far in the future. What about New Hampshire? Rubio inched up to 15 percent there in the latest poll, his best showing in weeks, but Trump’s still at 36 percent. Even if you allow for a “Trump effect” in the polls, where Trump’s support is systematically overstated by, say, five points, Rubio still has to make up more than 15 points in the next five days. And he has to do it with basically everyone in the field not only attacking him but forging alliances to attack him:

Members of the Bush and Christie campaigns have communicated about their mutual desire to halt Mr. Rubio’s rise in the polls, according to Republican operatives familiar with the conversations.

While emails, texts and phone calls between operatives in rival campaigns are not uncommon in the tight-knit world of political strategists, the contact between senior aides in the two campaigns has drifted toward musings about what can be done to stop or at least slow Mr. Rubio, the operatives said.

In a sign of a budding alliance, the aides have, for example, exchanged news articles that raise potential areas of vulnerability for Mr. Rubio. There is no formal coordination, the operatives stressed, but rather a recognition of a shared agenda…

A division of labor seems to have taken hold. While a well-financed “super PAC” supporting Mr. Bush assails Mr. Rubio on television and in the mail (it will release a new batch of ads on Thursday), Mr. Christie has stepped up the critiques on the campaign trail.

The latest joint Bush/Christie production is to attack Rubio for being unelectable because he’s … too hardline on abortion. So Rubio’s not too establishment for a Republican primary? He’s actually … too conservative? Admittedly, any attack by Bush or Christie will seem feeble because they have the stench of death around them, but I don’t get Christie’s “boy in the bubble” takedown and I don’t see how abortion is the magic bullet that destroys Rubio’s vaunted electability. All Republican candidates will be attacked as “anti-woman,” whatever the nuances of their positions on exceptions for rape. If you want to stop Rubio, you’re best off hitting him for lacking experience — which Christie and Bush are both doing, wisely — and for his great heresy on immigration. But Jeb can’t do that because he’s knee-deep in amnesty too, and no one believes Christie when he pretends to be offended by the Gang of Eight. The dilemma for Bush, Kasich, and Christie is that, while Rubio may be establishment, he’s still less establishment than they are even with the immigration bill chained to his ankles. How do you beat him in New Hampshire from the left?

Is this a good poll or a bad one for Marco Rubio? The good news is he’s up four points and remains in second place in the state with a bunch of big endorsements no doubt set to happen later this month. The bad news — terrible news, really — is that the “moderate” lane is more jammed up than ever. Kasich is also up since last month, from eight points to 11. And don’t look now but Jeb Bush has crept back into double digits, tied with Ted Cruz. Between them, Rubio, Christie, Bush, and Kasich combine for 47 percent of the vote, but because each of them is showing signs of promise, none of them has an incentive to scale back or drop out in order to clear the lane for one of the other four.

There’s every reason to believe this RINO logjam will persist right up to election day unless a major endorsement somehow shakes something loose. Without that, it’s difficult to see how Trump loses New Hampshire. He has the highest percentage (68 percent) among top-tier candidates of voters who say they’re firmly committed to voting for him, which stands to reason given that he occupies his own distinct niche vis-a-vis the rest of the field. I think the donor class can tolerate Trump winning NH so long as some establishmentarian like Rubio or Christie finishes a strong second. Increasingly, though, it seems like not even that consolation prize will happen; we might end up with Trump taking 30 percent of the vote next month while Rubio, Christie, and maybe even Bush or Kasich carve out 12-18 percent apiece. That’s the true establishment nightmare scenario, where everyone moves on to South Carolina with Cruz having won Iowa, Trump having won New Hampshire, and the moderate niche still unsettled and divided. I still think Rubio will emerge from that pack, but the longer it takes, the weaker he’ll look and the longer it’ll take him to catch up in delegates.

The establishment split is what’s keeping Trump in such a good position. In a pared down field of the candidates generally viewed as the top 3 in the overall race Trump would lead Rubio by just 2 points, 36/34, with Cruz back at 19%. And Trump trails Rubio 52/40 and Cruz 46/39 in head to head match ups while leading Bush just 46/45. But as long as Rubio and Christie and Kasich and Bush are all in the race they’re splitting the vote enough to let Trump’s passionate base give him a big lead.

The candidates with the biggest gains since our last poll in early December are Bush (up 5 points from 5% to 10%), Rubio (up 4 points from 11% to 15), and Kasich (up 3 points from 8% to 11%). Bush and Kasich have also had notable gains in their favorability ratings. Bush has gone from negative territory last month (38/45) to positive ground (44/42). It may not sound like much but it’s been a long time since we found Bush with an above water favorability anywhere. Kasich’s improved from 38/35 to 46/30.

How tough would things be for Trump in New Hampshire if he had to face Rubio — or Cruz — head to head? Pretty tough:

Both Rubio and Cruz win the support of every other candidate’s voters against Trump except for Rubio losing to him among Cruz supporters — but only narrowly, and he still wins overall by double digits. There’s no doubt looking at those numbers that Trump is benefiting tremendously from a divided field in NH. In light of that, I’d be curious to see some head-to-head polls between him and Cruz in blue-state primaries that will be held later this spring. The going theory is that Trump, with his coalition of “radical moderates,” might clean up in more moderate states, but I’m not so sure looking at this. If every other candidate’s supporters prefer Cruz to him, why wouldn’t that also be true in states beyond New Hampshire? And don’t forget, if it does eventually come down to Cruz and Trump, Cruz will benefit as establishmentarians grudgingly come around to backing him as the least bad choice for nominee. That’ll affect some centrists who otherwise might be cool to him. It’s hard to imagine Trump easily defeating Cruz head to head, but I can sort of imagine Cruz easily defeating Trump.

In fact, in lieu of an exit question, have a look at this new NBC/SurveyMonkey national data on who wins the race for second choice among various candidates’ supporters. Among Trump’s fans, it’s Cruz in a landslide over Rubio. Among Rubio’s fans? Cruz by double digits. Among Carson’s supporters? Cruz tied with Trump. Among the combined supporters of Christie, Bush, and Fiorina? Cruz by two over Rubio. He’s very well positioned to build support as other candidates drop out, especially if Trump folds up his tent. In the past I’ve questioned whether Trump fans, who aren’t dogmatic conservatives, will really break for Mr. Tea Party as a second choice, but that’s clearly the case in New Hampshire per PPP’s data. No contest here, with Cruz topping Rubio among Trump fans, 37/10:

The only sure thing about the primary right now, it seems, is that Ted Cruz is going to be in this race for many months to come. I’m not sure that’s true of anyone else in the field, Trump included.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2016/01/06/new-hampshire-trump-29-rubio-15-christie-11-kasich-11-bush-10-cruz-10/feed/613889230PPP poll: Christie now in double digits in New Hampshire, just three points out of second placehttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/12/03/ppp-poll-christie-now-in-double-digits-in-new-hampshire-just-three-points-out-of-second-place/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/12/03/ppp-poll-christie-now-in-double-digits-in-new-hampshire-just-three-points-out-of-second-place/#commentsFri, 04 Dec 2015 00:21:38 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3886066Surge.

At least four newsy takeaways here. Five, if you want to count Trump continuing to maintain a lead he’s had for months in NH into December.

The newsiest, of course, is the Christie comeback, assuming it’s actually happening and this isn’t some freaky outlier. As things now stand: Trump 27, Cruz 13, Rubio 11, Christie 10.

The clear momentum candidate in New Hampshire is Chris Christie. In mid-October he was in 9th place in the state at just 3%. Now he’s moved all the way up into the 4th position with his 10% standing. Most remarkably though he now has the best favorability rating of any of the candidates in New Hampshire, with 61% of voters seeing him positively to only 22% who have a negative opinion. To put those numbers in perspective Christie was at 35/46 when we polled the state in August, so he’s had a 50 point net improvement in his favorability over the last three months. That’s a good reminder of how early it still is in this race and how much things can change in a short time. Christie is the most frequent second choice of Bush and Kasich voters so if either of them doesn’t make it to New Hampshire he’ll be well positioned to further gain.

No other poll of New Hampshire has had Christie as high as 10 percent but two polls taken three weeks ago had him at eight. This is also the first survey conducted in the state since before Thanksgiving, so maybe it’s picking up movement that other pollsters haven’t had a chance to detect yet. Christie’s got lots of room to grow as his centrist lane of the race narrows. Kasich, for instance, seems to be slipping, probably because of his mind-bogglingly obnoxious performance at the last debate. If Christie, a natural second choice for fans of a centrist governor like Kasich, picks up most of his support eventually, he’ll be polling in the teens — maybe even within 10 points or so of Trump for the lead. And remember, Christie’s been camped out in New Hampshire for weeks with no intention of leaving. He’s going to give voters there all the attention they could want. Candidates like Trump and Rubio, who are competing in Iowa and South Carolina, can’t do that.

That brings us to the second newsy bit: Jeb Bush is now down to eighth place with just five percent in his must-win state. He’s the flip side of Christie in that no other recent poll has him sunk that low, but if there really is a Christie surge happening, it stands to reason that it comes partly at Bush’s expense. He too is a centrist governor with about 1/100th of Christie’s charisma. The more New Hampshire center-righties feel that Christie has at least as good of a chance as Jeb to win, the more willing they might be to tilt towards Christie on pure retail appeal. Bush’s strategy in New Hampshire so far has been to somehow nudge past Rubio, trust that Kasich will collapse under the weight of his own unlikability, and count on Christie to remain an asterisk candidate; if all of that happens, then NH voters may see the race as a binary “Trump or Bush” choice and maybe that’s enough to give Bush a surprise win, if only because of his supposed electability. The problem is, not only is he not nudging past Rubio, he’s now fading behind a surging Christie. It’s almost impossible to see him becoming the “centrist choice” if Rubio and Christie are serious players in the state. According to PPP, Bush’s favorables are now 38/45, the worst of any serious Republican contender. (Worse even than Kasich.) And this is after Jeb did a campaign overhaul to “project confidence,” show off his foreign policy strength or whatever, and so on. If this poll is accurate, he’s done.

The third newsy element here: Ted Cruz is in second place in New Hampshire, which is sort of hard to believe but also sort of not. He finished second in Gravis’s poll of the state last month and has been hovering at around 10-11 percent in several surveys since, just a few points behind Rubio. It’s been a long time, though, since a true right-winger won New Hampshire. You have to go back to Pat Buchanan in 1996, past Romney, John McCain, George W. Bush (unopposed), and McCain again — and unlike Cruz, no one thought Buchanan had a serious shot at the nomination. Imagine, though, that Cruz wins Iowa and a surprisingly strong, straight-talkin’ establishment centrist like Christie keeps rising and eventually takes a few votes from Trump. Rubio will be a factor too, meaning that the “moderate” vote could split three ways between Trump, Rubio, and Christie, effectively holding them all to something like 70 percent of the vote collectively. If the other 30 percent consists of conservatives and tea partiers unified behind Cruz, a not-crazy possibility if he wins Iowa, then suddenly there’s a real chance that Cruz wins both early states and becomes a prohibitive favorite for the nomination. He’d be a heavy favorite in South Carolina, and if he won there, he could be a juggernaut in the “SEC primary.” The establishment would probably turn to Rubio, who’d be expected to win Florida, as the last chance to stop Cruz, but at that point I don’t know if he could.

Which brings us to the last newsy bit from the poll: Marco Rubio should be more than a little worried about a Christie surge here, no? His campaign will tell you that none of these early states are must-win for him so long as he finishes well, which is kind of true in the sense that he’s still got Florida in his back pocket. If worse comes to worst, the theory goes, he loses Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and most or all of the SEC states, then wins a big one at home and starts to mount a comeback in the blue-state primaries. You’re risking a lot, though, if you think Rubio’s going to survive loss after loss early on, with the media clobbering him with “Is Marco Rubio a paper tiger?” stories, and then somehow beat Trump and/or Cruz in Florida. If I recall correctly, in the past 40 years the GOP has never nominated a candidate who lost both Iowa and New Hampshire. Early momentum is important. And if Rubio is now behind Cruz with Christie closing in, he’s in real trouble of not just losing the state but conceivably finishing out of the top three. We’re going to nominate that guy? How?

Exit question: Christie’s trying to win New Hampshire despite being a guaranteed also-ran in Iowa. Not only won’t he finish in the top three there, he may end up in the low single digits. When was the last time a Republican won NH despite being a complete non-factor in IA? McCain finished fourth there with 13 percent in 2008, just behind Fred Thompson. Christie’s in eighth place in RCP’s poll average with just 2.3 percent. How can a serious candidate for the nomination win one key state while being a total zero in another?

If all you’re interested in is the topline then this is the best poll for Trump in weeks. Only once since the second GOP debate had he reached as high as 26 percent in a national poll — until today. He’s still 10 points better than his closest competitor here. And although he’s dropped two points, from 29 percent to 27, since PPP published its last national poll on September 1st, no one else except for Marco Rubio has gained more than two points in that time either. Rubio picked up six points to move from fifth place to third this time, another sign that he’s emerging as a center-right alternative to Jeb but not as some sort of juggernaut who threatens Trump. Yet.

As I say, that’s the good news for Trump fans. The other news in today’s poll is … not so good:

He’s had a 14 point drop in his net favorability rating over the last month from +26 at 56/30 to now just +12 at 50/38. And he’s lost ground in head to head match ups with the other leading GOP contenders. The only one he leads is Bush by 20 points at 56/36, although even that is down from his 25 point advantage at 59/34 last time. Last month he led Rubio (50/42) and Fiorina (48/41) in head to heads, now he trails them 50/43 and 47/45 respectively. And what was already a 49/43 deficit to Carson one on one has now grown to 52/41. But perhaps the worst blow for Trump may be that GOP voters don’t think he’s as rich as he says is. Only 30% believe his net worth is over even 5 billion dollars to 55% who think it’s below that threshold. For the most part people aren’t buying his 10 billion dollar claim.

I’ve been watching his numbers in PPP’s head-to-head contests for weeks on the theory that they probably tell us more about Trump’s real strength in the race than even the topline numbers do. At some point the primaries will in fact become a two- or three-candidate race and voters who are backing other candidates right now or are otherwise undecided will have to make a choice. If forced to choose between Trump and Rubio or Trump and Fiorina, will they stick with the guy who’s currently leading the polls? A PPP poll of North Carolina in August showed Trump trailing numerous Republican rivals head-to-head even though he led the overall field at the time. But then, a few weeks later, things had changed: Trump actually led various competitors head to head in PPP’s national poll of September 1st, suggesting that GOP voters really were starting to think of him as a viable nominee even after the field inevitably winnowed. Today’s poll turns all of that around, placing Trump behind Carson, Rubio, and Fiorina, with only sad-sack Jeb Bush still less attractive to GOP voters than Trump is when given a binary choice.

What’s more, if you scroll down to page 12 of the crosstabs, you’ll find that supporters of nearly every other GOP candidate reliably break against Trump when he’s pitted against Carson, Fiorina, or Rubio. The only exceptions are Rand Paul’s and Rick Santorum’s supporters, and they might be hard to gauge accurately given how small those samples are. Supporters of Ted Cruz, who’s spent months complimenting Trump, prefer Carson to Trump by a margin of 75/17, prefer Fiorina by a margin of 71/24, and prefer Rubio by a margin of 59/30. Even Trump’s ostentatious hawkishness on immigration can’t woo Cruz fans away from Rubio, in other words. The suggestion here is that there’s strong “Anyone But Trump” sentiment among the majority of voters who aren’t already supporting him, exceeded only by “Anyone But Bush” sentiment. (Jeb’s favorable rating is a gruesome 34/49 among Republicans generally and 26/56 among “very conservative” Republicans.) Trump either needs to turn those numbers around or he needs to hope that the field stays unexpectedly large throughout the early primaries, allowing him to win as the majority splinters among other candidates and he builds up irresistible momentum. Any early shrinking of the field to just a few credible alternatives and he’s got a problem, at least if today’s trend holds.

Worth noting, by the way: Chris Christie has turned his own gruesome favorable rating among Republicans in September (28/54) into a semi-respectable 43/38 rating now. That’s what a pretty good debate can do for someone. Three weeks and counting until the next one.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/10/06/ppp-poll-trump-27-carson-17-rubio-13-bush-10/feed/3423879624Two new polls show Jeb Bush trailing Trump by at least 15 points — in his home state of Floridahttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/15/two-new-polls-show-jeb-bush-trailing-trump-by-at-least-15-points-in-his-home-state-of-florida/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/15/two-new-polls-show-jeb-bush-trailing-trump-by-at-least-15-points-in-his-home-state-of-florida/#commentsTue, 15 Sep 2015 18:41:28 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3877120The cruelest cut.

Chin up, Jeb fans. It could be worse. You could be fans of Marco Rubio, who’s trailing Trump by 18 or 28 points there depending upon whether you trust PPP or Gravis more.

Trump’s primary-night victory party at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach will be epic, the final stage of his transformation into Rodney Dangerfield’s establishment-smashing country-clubber in “Caddyshack.” In the meantime, a question: Isn’t Jeb Bush supposed to be popular in Florida? When was the last time anyone checked on that, 2005?

Only 40% of voters in the state think Bush should keep running, compared to 47% who think he should drop out. And the numbers are similar for Rubio with just 42% believing he should continue on with his campaign to 48% who believe he should end it…

Bush’s position with the GOP electorate in Florida is so weak that he even trails Trump 55/38 when the two are matched up head to head. Trump’s 56/35 favorability rating comes in a tick ahead of Bush’s 55/36 favorability. When we polled the state earlier this year Bush led the Republican field at 25%, and boasted a 66/24 rating.

Trump leads with 28 percent in PPP’s poll, with Ben Carson second at 17 percent, Bush at 13, and Rubio at 10. Gravis has Trump at 33.6 percent followed by Carson at 22.4, Jeb at 15.2, and Rubio at a dismal 5.4. Yes, you read that correctly: Both polls have Trump ahead of the combined total of Florida’s two native sons. For Rubio, at least, there’s a glimmer of hope in his favorable ratings. He’s at 73/20 in PPP’s survey, which is good enough to lead Trump head to head there 49/46. When Gravis tested Rubio and Bush head to head in a battle for Florida, Rubio won that too — handily, topping Jeb 51/31(!). He’s also more likely to have Republicans say he should stay in the race than Jeb, with 62 percent backing Rubio’s continued run versus just 52 percent who want Bush to keep going. The reasons for that may be more complex than simple popularity. Jeb’s strategy, remember, was to try to clear the field early with a “shock and awe” fundraising blitz; he was sold as a guy who would poll well right out of the gate. Hasn’t happened, which leaves him smelling of disappointment. Rubio’s a guy whom everyone expects will need time to introduce himself to voters before any boomlet happens, if it happens. He doesn’t have the same air of deflated expectations at this point in the race as Jeb does. Also, it may be that Floridians are more invested in Rubio because they know him better than Bush at this point. One of the questions hanging over Jeb before he got in was that he’d been out of office for so long that young adult voters might have no idea of who he is beyond his surname. You may be seeing that in the “keep running” numbers here. If you’re a 25-year-old who voted for Rubio for Senate, you want him to give every chance to surge in the polls. Meanwhile, Bush had left office before you were even old enough to vote. Who cares what he ends up doing?

As for Jeb’s supposed strength with Latino voters, chew on these three results:

Those numbers are for the overall electorate in Florida, of course, not just Republicans. Rubio is strongest with Latinos at net -5; Trump, who’s been a villain in Spanish-language media for three months, is at -20; and the great establishment hope, Jeb, is at … -23. In fairness to him, he’s actually the best of three among Latinos head to head with Hillary — sort of. She leads him 46/33 with that group versus 50/36 against Rubio and 56/34 against Trump. That is to say, although Jeb pulls the smallest share of Latinos among the three candidates, he also holds Hillary to her smallest share, leading to a deficit of just 13 points. Then again, if Hillary only ends up pulling 55-60 percent of the Latino vote against Donald “Mexican rapists” Trump in swing states, she’ll almost certainly lose the election regardless. Trump’s numbers here are actually surprisingly good for a Republican, especially one who’s made his bones pounding the table about borders.

So says PPP, the same outfit responsible for that poll a few weeks back showing Trump losing head-to-head match-ups against Rubio and Walker in North Carolina. Either NC is an outlier or the mood has changed nationally because Republicans across America now prefer him to either of those candidates — and not narrowly either. He leads Rubio by eight when voters are forced to choose between them and Walker by 14. As for Jeb Bush, gadzooks:

Jeb’s got another month to turn things around before the donor class heads for the lifeboats, I think. There is one candidate tested who still tops Trump head to head: That’d be Ben Carson, the race’s nice-guy outsider, who leads Trump by six, 49/43. How come? Quite possibly because of evangelical support. Evangelicals prefer Trump to Bush, Rubio, and even Scott Walker by comfortable margins. Against Carson, though, Trump trails 49/41 among that group versus 48/44 among non-evangelicals. That’s a bad sign for Trumpmania in Iowa if Carson has legs.

Here’s an … interesting poll result.

Our new poll finds that Trump is benefiting from a GOP electorate that thinks Barack Obama is a Muslim and was born in another country, and that immigrant children should be deported. 66% of Trump’s supporters believe that Obama is a Muslim to just 12% that grant he’s a Christian. 61% think Obama was not born in the United States to only 21% who accept that he was. And 63% want to amend the Constitution to eliminate birthright citizenship, to only 20% who want to keep things the way they are.

Trump’s beliefs represent the consensus among the GOP electorate. 51% overall want to eliminate birthright citizenship. 54% think President Obama is a Muslim. And only 29% grant that President Obama was born in the United States. That’s less than the 40% who think Canadian born Ted Cruz was born in the United States.

Among Republicans who believe Obama was born in the U.S., Trump leads the GOP field with a comparatively modest 21 percent. Among those who don’t believe Obama was born here, he leads with 39 percent. Head to head among the group that believes Obama was born here, he trails all five candidates he’s tested against — Bush, Carson, Fiorina, Rubio, and Walker. Among the group that believes Obama wasn’t born here, he utterly demolishes all five, with Carson trailing by 16 points and the rest trailing by 30 points or more. You get similar results when you divide the primary electorate by who thinks Obama is a Christian and who thinks he’s a Muslim. Trump leads the field among the first group with 24 percent but leads among the second with 35 percent. The head-to-head polling is predictable too, with Trump trailing badly to Bush, Carson, Fiorina, and Rubio among the “Obama is a Christian” group but winning handily among the “Obama is a Muslim” crowd. (He leads Scott Walker among both groups.) You wanted populism, you got it.

As for Trump’s appeal among different wings of the party, it’s true that he’s leading among tea partiers and non-tea-partiers alike but his strength is much greater among the first group than the second here. Among TPers, he’s the first choice of 42 percent, far more than anyone else in the field; among non-TPers, he leads with 25 percent, 10 points ahead of Carson. In head-to-head match-ups TPers prefer him to all of the five other candidates, and only Carson even makes it close. Scott Walker, the next strongest Trump challenger in this category, trails him among tea partiers by 19 points.

But never mind all that. What you really want is the “Trump vs. Fox News and Megyn Kelly” polling. Here you go.

Tea partiers prefer Trump handily to Kelly but they’re evenly divided between Trump and Fox News generally. In fact, Fox has an astounding 86/4 favorable rating among tea partiers versus 62/19 for the rest of the party. Even Kelly is at 48/27 within the group, a rating most politicians would accept happily. Interestingly, although Fox News’s favorability is much higher among those who say Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. than those who say he is, Kelly’s favorability runs the other way, increasing among those who think Obama was born here. The same trend shows up among those who say Obama’s a Christian and those who say Obama’s a Muslim: Fox is more popular with the latter group whereas Kelly is more popular with the former. That’s in keeping with her image generally as a more middle-of-the-road anchor in Fox’s otherwise firmly right-wing line-up.

Oh, incidentally: She just finished the month of August at number one in all of cable news, O’Reilly included, in the 25-54 demo, the group that advertisers care most about. That’s only the third time she’s done that since “The Kelly File” began. What happened to the post-debate boycott?

New from PPP. “Why should I care about a poll of North Carolina?” you’re asking yourself. It’s not so much that you should care about NC as you should care about head-to-head results, and this poll is one of the few taken since Trumpmania began that shows how he’d fare in that regard. Remember, it won’t be long after the first few primary states vote that the field shrinks dramatically and we’re left with three or four viable candidates. Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio will probably be one of them depending upon who wins Florida. Ted Cruz is likely to be one of them given his surprising fundraising haul and his expected strength in the south. The winner in Iowa, be it Scott Walker, Ben Carson, or someone else, might also have enough momentum to be viable in March. And of course Donald Trump, the current frontrunner, will still be standing if he can hold onto his 25 percent share of the vote. With each new primary result, though, the viability of one or more of these candidates will fade. And since Trump is the establishment’s public enemy number one, they’ll be applying heavy pressure on the two or three other candidates who are still around next spring to back the most viable among them and give voters a binary “Trump versus Not Trump” choice (assuming Trump himself is still in the race at the time, of course). If you’re serious about nominating Trump, you need 51 percent of Republicans to prefer him to the other guy once that binary choice is forced. PPP’s poll gives us a small window onto whether that’s likely, at least at this early stage.

Answer: Nope.

Trump’s 8 point gain gives him the biggest momentum in the state over the last month. The other two candidates with upward momentum are Carson and Cruz. Carson’s gone from 9% to 14% as people’s first choice. Beyond that he’s 21% of voters’ second choice, making him the clear leader on that front. And his 66/11 favorability rating makes him the most popular of the GOP hopefuls in the state. Cruz has gone from 6% a month ago to his 10% standing now…

If voters had to choose just between Trump and Ben Carson (59/35), Marco Rubio (51/43), or Scott Walker (50/43) the supporters of the other candidates would coalesce around the non-Trump candidate enough that he would lag behind. Trump has the most passionate supporters at this point but at the end of the day his popularity isn’t that broad. He would at least lead Bush 50/42 in a head to head. Bush has a 37/47 favorability with ‘very conservative’ voters and that skepticism towards him on the right will continue to cause him problems unless he can change that.

Trump leads the race overall by 10 points, but force people to pick him or one of the other men who trail him and he fades behind them. (By nearly 25 points when facing off with Carson, another Beltway outsider!) This isn’t the only poll lately either to show Republicans swinging behind “Not Trump” when asked to choose between him and anyone else:

Could Trump grow his current support to a majority of Republican primary voters? A recent HuffPost/YouGov poll of all Republicans shows that he faces considerable resistance. On a two-way, forced-choice question, 26 percent of Republican registered voters said they preferred Donald Trump as their nominee — a number roughly comparable to his standing in other polls — but 54 percent said they prefer “someone else.”

The new CNN poll found a similar result: Thirty-eight percent of Republican registered voters said their party has a “better chance of winning the presidency in 2016” if Trump is their nominee, while 58 percent said they will have a better chance with “someone else.”

Because Trump’s already so famous, Mark Blumenthal speculates, it may be hard for him to convince skeptics who are already opposed to him to give him a second look. (Then again, that was also the reason given early for why Trump probably couldn’t improve his dismal favorable rating among Republicans, right before he turned those numbers upside down by taking a hard line on immigration.) In particular, it may be that Trump’s many heresies against conservatism in the past have convinced conservative voters that he’s unsuitable to be nominee, even if they’re enjoying the anti-establishment show he’s putting on right now. Check out the ideological breakdown in the head-to-head match-ups with Carson, Rubio, and Walker:

Contrary to conventional wisdom, it’s moderates, not conservatives, who are making Trump competitive against the more right-wing candidates in the race — even though “very conservative” voters give Trump a higher favorable rating (51/35) than moderates do (49/40). Conservatives like him. They just don’t like him as much as they like an actual conservative, at least in North Carolina. That’s a bad omen for Trump when The Winnowing begins to happen next spring.

Even so, he’s not the biggest loser in this poll. Behold the fate of Mr. Electability:

Not only will conservatives bite the bullet and vote for Trump over the establishmentarian Bush, but Jeb can’t even make up for that among his supposed base of moderates. They too prefer the loose cannon Trump to Bush 3.0. In a week of terrible polls for Jeb, this may be the most discouraging.